Mature virtualization technology continues to play active role in business

For a technology that is still viewed as an innovative part of tomorrow's enterprise IT setup, virtualization has actually been around for a lot longer than many might realize.
Nevertheless, according to IT Business Edge blogger Arthur Cole, there is no end in sight for virtualization's primary role in the development of new business computing infrastructures.

Part of the reason for this, he said, is that the presence of the technology in what is a likely majority of companies masks an underlying fact - mostly, server virtualization is still the be-all and end-all for less technically savvy firms.

However, that could be changing quickly, Cole reported, citing an IDC study that found almost 40 percent of CIOs are planning to place new emphasis on virtualization in the new year and consolidate their existing virtual infrastructures.

This demonstrates that it has only recently become in the best short-term interests of many companies to make a broader move into virtualization, the IT Business Edge blogger said.

"It also indicates that there is still a lot of underutilization on the server side while networking and storage systems are not so overloaded with virtual machines as some would have us believe," he wrote.

There is an established trend, according to Cole, toward trying to do more with less in the business IT world. This may be a product of the twin influences of ongoing economic uncertainty and the arrival of big data in earnest. What this means, he said, is that companies frequently must add IT capacity while simultaneously making their infrastructures cheaper and easier to work with.

Getting traffic out of the server-client model is important to developing the types of architecture necessary for these advances, he wrote.

"These days, server-to-server and server-to-storage links are just as vital, which means not only is the old Spanning Tree architecture obsolete but most of the earlier VLAN iterations are as well. Unified fabrics that can be configured and reconfigured at a moment's notice can avoid many of today's I/O choke points will be the order of the day," Cole noted.

Virtualization, then, along with exciting offshoot cloud computing, looks to remain a central part of the data center for the foreseeable future, according to experts.